SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Bird deaths down 70 percent after painting wind turbine blades:
Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.
Not everyone is a fan of wind turbines, however, because of their impact on local populations of flying fauna like birds and bats.
[...] Previous laboratory studies have suggested that birds may not be very good at seeing obstructions while they're flying, and adding visual cues like different colored fan blades can increase birds' chances of spotting a rapidly rotating fan.
[...] And so, in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines—a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.
Digging into the data a little more showed some variation on bird deaths depending upon the season. During spring and autumn, fewer bird deaths were recorded at the painted turbines. But in summer, bird deaths actually increased at the painted turbines, and the authors note that the small number of turbines in the study and its relatively short duration both merit longer-term replication studies, both at Smøla and elsewhere.
Journal Reference:
Roel May, Torgeir Nygård, Ulla Falkdalen, et al. Paint it black: Efficacy of increased wind turbine rotor blade visibility to reduce avian fatalities [open], Ecology and Evolution (DOI: 10.1002/ece3.6592)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 27 2020, @03:34PM (2 children)
Please read the article again, and note the number of raptor deaths. Raptors are far less common than something like barn swallows.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday August 27 2020, @05:41PM (1 child)
And by "far less common", we mean still enough that 20 deaths isn't significant. So, for instance, if you look at just bald eagles, there are about 150,000 bald eagles in the US, and during a typical year about 7500 die. So even if you concentrate the deaths entirely on this one relatively uncommon species, it's accounting for approximately 0.3% of their deaths.
I'm not saying "don't bother with this cheap and effective technique for protecting birds", but I am saying that most of the pearl-clutching about birds and wind turbines is really just about saying "I don't like wind power for other reasons".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 27 2020, @05:50PM
We could argue the significance. IMO waste of life is waste of life. If a bit of paint on spinning blades is going to save half of those creatures, I would say to paint the blades. I haven't called for abolishing the blades, I am only saying that if it's possible to make them more visible to birds, let's do it.